Gibson Goes to Bat for the Pitchers

If you want to argue who was the best pitcher of all time, bring a bed.

If you want to argue who was the best black pitcher of all time, the book closes pretty quickly. Satchel Paige stands alone.

And if you want to talk about the best black pitcher of the modern era, that’s no contest, either. Baseball will take a Gibson on the rocks.

The thing about Bob Gibson is, he reduced pitching to its essentials. Bob Gibson was the original “Here, hit this!” advocate of pitching form.

Journalists used to love Bob Gibson-pitched games. Like their originator, there was no nonsense about them. Nobody ever saw Bob Gibson fidget with the rosin bag, walk around the infield, call his catcher out for a conference.

Gibson got the ball; Gibson threw the ball. Usually at 96 m.p.h. or more. He then couldn’t wait for his catcher to get the ball back to him. He would stand there, impatiently beckoning for it. The minute he got it, he would fire it at, or past, the batter.

“Sometimes, I would balk,” he says. “Because, I would get ready to throw it, and Timmy (McCarver, his catcher) wouldn’t be there. And I’d have to abort.”

Gibson just thought it was the way to pitch. And with his stuff, it was. Games Bob Gibson pitched against Ferguson Jenkins used to be classics of economy--79-pitch, 81-minute games.

Gibson couldn’t countenance anybody coming to the mound. This included his manager, his catcher, his infield--and it certainly included any batters waving bats or fists. Nobody charged a mound with Bob Gibson on it.

Gibson took the position that two pieces of real estate belonged to him on the field, the pitcher’s mound--and the center of the plate. If you encroached on either, you could count on making him mad. Or madder. Because Gibson usually was mad to begin with. Someone said he never pitched out of a windup; he pitched out of a cold rage. It was not sound strategy to compound this. Because the madder he got, the better he got.

There was nothing fancy about what Bob Gibson did--no forkballs, split-fingered fastballs, screwballs, palmballs, spitballs. Gibson never threw a junk pitch in his life. Or a waste pitch. He didn’t believe in waste.

“Once,” he recalls, “the manager, Red Schoendienst, announced he was going to fine any pitcher who got hit on an 0-and-2 count. I said I might as well quit pitching because all my strikeouts (there were more than 3,000 of them, fifth most in history at the time) came on 0-and-2 counts.”

Gibson just threw quickly--and hard. The fastball was sonic, the slider was probably 90 m.p.h., which is obscene velocity for a breaking ball, and the curveball he only used for window dressing against right-handed hitters.

Bob Gibson, the man, was like Bob Gibson the pitcher. He couldn’t stand any 3-and-2 counts in life, either. On or off the mound, Gibson couldn’t abide wasting his time. You got the fastball in life, too.

Gibby, or Hoot, as the ballplayers used to call him, was in town this week advancing the Equitable Old-Timers’ Series of baseball games, which swings into Dodger Stadium today, where an all-Dodger reunion of former stars is on tap as part of the 26-game tour the insurance company is sponsoring to benefit old-time non-pension players.

Gibson, who posted the lowest single-season earned-run-average in baseball history--1.12--in 1968, and won three complete games in the 1967 World Series, is distressed at the turn baseball is taking.

It is his view that the game is systematically removing the rights from a minority Gibson identifies most closely with--the pitchers. “They have removed the inside half of the plate from the strike zone,” he says, scowling as if he had just uncovered a Communist plot.

More than a third of the plate has become, in the glowering view of Gibson, a kind of demilitarized zone. The object is to protect the batter. The result is to ostracize the pitcher.

“The ruling that you can’t pitch inside anymore might be cause to take somebody to court,” Gibson warns, only half-jokingly. “This is taking your livelihood away if you’re a pitcher. This forces you to come out over the plate with a pitch, and that is your bread-and-butter area. You want to have moved the batter off the plate before you come out there. Now, you can’t. We used to have all 17 inches of the plate. Now, you’re losing six or seven.”

Also, it’s the important six or seven, adds Gibson.

“The way you get guys out is with outside pitches, not inside,” he says. “Inside pitches go over the fence. But you set up your out pitch by coming inside, not just once but until you have that batter where you want him. When he knows you can’t do that, he’s just digging in.”

Ballplayers knew better than to dig in on Bob Gibson. In the old Coliseum baseball days, Duke Snider, faced with a 440-foot right-field fence, experimented once with inside-out hitting to loft a ball over the 250-foot left-field fence. He got one home run and, the next time, looped one, just foul, over the net.

He thought he had the solution and got set to step into the next pitch to do the same. The pitch from Gibson shattered his right elbow.

The word went out. Get a long foul on Gibson and he made sure the next pitch stayed in the ballpark by burying it in your anatomy.

Gibson, who got his own ankle broken by a line drive from Roberto Clemente, only shrugs. “It’s dangerous out there--for everybody.”

He believes that the art of pitching calls for the periodic brush-back. The intention is rarely to hit, it’s just not to be hit.

“If a pitcher wants to hit you, he can,” Lou Brock used to insist, and Gibson agrees. “The head is the easiest part of the body to move. The rest is not so easy to get out of the way.”

Baseball men call it the purpose pitch. Gibson had a dandy, but it was the opinion of Maury Wills that he didn’t need it. “His fastball you couldn’t hit anyway,” he said.

Gibson threw 90% fastballs in his career. Only a very small percentage of them were at hitters. More than 9,000 of them went to the catcher. But he wanted all 17 inches of home plate. “You can’t let the hitter get comfortable up there,” he warns.

Ted Williams once had a hitting wheel. It showed what you would bat if you swung at pitches in various locations of the strike zone. Out over the plate was .380 to .400. The rules are forcing pitchers to throw in the hitter’s wheelhouse. It may please the National Safety Council, Gibson says, but you’re never going to hang up any 1.12 earned-run averages with it.